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| March 26, 2007 | Monday | Rabi-ul-Awwal 6, 1428 |
Smith bullish despite defeat
BASSETERRE, March 25: South Africa captain Graeme Smith said his team remained confident of World Cup success despite their loss to Australia in their Group A match on Saturday.
“A victory would have been terrific, but there's still so much cricket to be played in the tournament,” Smith told reporters.
“The key is to win enough games to get yourself into the semi-finals and we know what we need to do.
“A total of 350 would probably have been a gettable total, maybe 378 was a few too many to chase,” Smith said.
“We were right in there up until the 35th over, maybe we left ourselves too much to do in the last 10 overs.
“The turning point for me was that A.B. (de Villiers) and I theoretically got out at about the same time. I've never had cramp as badly as that before.”
Smith was satisfied that his team had put up a competitive performance.
“We certainly had opportunities to win the game,” he said.
“We lost wickets at crucial times, they bowled well in the last 10 overs and they had 20 runs too many.”
South Africa move on to the Super Eights in Guyana, where their first game is against Sri Lanka on Wednesday.
“One of our strengths of late is our ability to pick ourselves up; we're not a team that kills ourselves after we've lost a game,” Smith said.
Australian skipper Ricky Ponting singled out Shane Watson’s running out de Villiers as the turning point.
“Shane Watson's run-out probably had as much to do with the course of the game as anything else,” he said.
“I think the way we executed everything after that first breakthrough was terrific.
“The fielding was good and once we got a bit of a sniff we were all over them.
“Whenever a side is chasing a total like that, one little slip-up, one piece of great fielding from the opposition side, can put you on the back foot pretty quickly. That's what happened today.”
Ponting said he had fully expected the South Africans to go immediately on to the attack.
“I have been confident all week that our batters would do a good job today,” he said. “I knew we'd make a big score out there.
“I knew we'd post a big total and when we did they had only one option and that was to come out and play that way.”—Reuters
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